oral traditions of naqab bedouin women s songs, oral poetry and performances contain important...

Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 15.1 (2016): 31–57Edinburgh University PressDOI: 10.3366/hlps.2016.0128© Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studieswww.euppublishing.com/journal/hlps

ORAL TRADITIONS OF NAQAB BEDOUIN WOMEN:CHALLENGING SETTLER-COLONIAL

REPRESENTATIONS THROUGH EMBODIEDPERFORMANCE

Dr Sophie Richter-Devroe

Associate ProfessorPolitics and International Relations Program

Doha Institute for Graduate StudiesPO Box: 200592

Zone 66, Street no. 826, Villa 59Al-Mabahej Street

Doha, [email protected]

ABSTRACT

The Naqab Bedouin have faced—historically and today—various Israelisettler-colonial practices and discourses aimed at erasing their status as nativesof the land. Israeli representations of the Naqab Bedouin often stereotypethem as roaming nomads without any links (and consequently rights) tothe land or to other Palestinian communities. Naqab Bedouin women’s oraland embodied traditions constitute an important challenge to such settler-colonial representations. Women’s songs, oral poetry and performancescontain important historical counter-narratives, and they also function asembodied systems of learning, teaching, storing, and, to a certain extent,transmitting this community’s indigenous memories, knowledges and waysof being.

KEYWORDS: Naqab, Bedouin, Palestine, women, oral traditions, Zionism,settler-colonialism, song, poetry, resistance

Introduction

In one of my recent fieldwork trips to the Naqab, I visited the IsraeliMuseum of Bedouin Culture1 in the Jewish-Israeli Kibbutz Lahav. The

1 The Museum of Bedouin Culture is part of a broader complex, the Joe Alon Center,named after Joe (Yousif) Alon, a pilot and founder of the Israeli Air Force. The Centrewas founded in 1980 by Uzi Halamish from Kibbutz Lahav, and is funded by the Shimon

32 Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies

Museum had often been mentioned to me by Naqab Bedouin womenand men who live in the nearby Bedouin townships. These townships,where I had been conducting my fieldwork on Naqab Bedouin women’soral histories since February 2014,2 were established from the late 1960sonwards by the Israeli state to sedentarise the Bedouin population ofthe Naqab. When asking township residents about Naqab Bedouin oralcultures, performances and historical narratives, many referred me tothe Museum as a place where I could find such information. Theirrecommendations suggest that the coloniser’s Museum has begun toacquire an authoritative standing among the indigenous population.3

I went to the Museum in spring 2015 to find out more about thekinds of representations displayed there. The Naqab Bedouin have been,and continue to be, key in the Israeli drive to gain ownership ofknowledge production. What representations does the Israeli regimeemploy in an institution such as the museum to cement this image? Andhow are these images countered, but perhaps also sometimes internalised,by the local indigenous Bedouin population on whose lands the Museum,and the state as a whole, was built? What counter-representations andforms of resistance are possible for the colonised in such a context

Regional Council, the Jewish National Fund and private Jewish donors (Interview JoeAlon Museum 2015; Dinero 2002; www.joealon.org.il).

2 This research project was funded through an AHRC Early Career Fellowship(2014–2016), entitled ‘Gender and Settler Colonialism: Women’s Oral Histories in theNaqab’. I thank the AHRC for their financial support, and everyone I interviewed, spoketo and worked with in the Naqab, especially my host family, for their generous help,hospitality and friendship. I am very grateful to the participants in and co-organisers ofthe project’s two workshops which took place at Columbia University in April 2015 (inparticular Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Boyd) and Exeter University in October 2015 (inparticular Rosemary Sayigh, Ilan Pappe, Ahmad Sa’di, Cedric Parizot, Ahmad Amara,Richard Ratcliffe and Mansour Nasasra) for their very valuable and instructive commentson earlier versions of the paper. I also benefited greatly from the very useful comments Ireceived from Leyla Neyzi when presenting parts of the paper at IFEA in Istanbul, andRandall McGuire when presenting it at the 2015 AAA meeting in Denver. My finalthanks are to Yiannis Kanakis for encouraging me to search and look beyond discourse.All mistakes are mine.

3 I use the term ‘indigenous’ in its most common understanding of referring to nativeinhabitants of a given territory who have occupied this territory prior to subsequent wavesof settler colonisation. I understand indigeneity to be historically contingent and sociallyconstructed—there is no ‘authentic’ Naqab Bedouin indigenous culture or identity, butthis indigeneity evolves and adapts in time and place. Indigeneity and cultural endurance,as Clifford has argued, is not a state of being, but it ‘is a process of becoming’ in whichpeople ‘reach back selectively to deeply rooted, adaptive traditions: creating new pathwaysin a complex postmodernity’ (2013: 7). For a critical debate on the notion of indigeneityin different contexts, see, among others, Barcham (2000) on the Maori or Simpson (2000)on the Mohawk. For a debate on the advantages and disadvantages of using the term forlegal purposes in the Naqab case, see, among others, Amara (unpublished paper), Yiftachel(2008), Nasasra (2012).

Sophie Richter-Devroe Oral Traditions of Naqab Bedouin Women 33

where not only the land, but memories, knowledges, histories and otherrepresentations are being colonised?

The Museum holds various items related to ‘Bedouin culture’, whichare arranged to stimulate the visitor to develop a concept of theBedouin as exotic, savage and possibly dangerous. Following a classicOrientalist narrative, the Museum constructs the native as Other, relyingon folklorising elements (Bedouin tents and rugs), the ‘exotic’ (the camel),the ‘magic’ (Bedouin folk traditions), and the ‘dangerous’ (Bedouin men’sweaponry). As regards the gendered aspects of the Museum’s displays(the veiled, beguiling woman closed up inside the tent and concernedwith ‘family issues’), these seem designed to reinforce stereotypes. Theserepresentations project an image of the Museum as a modernist, civilisinginstitution engaged in ‘saving’ the Bedouin and their distinct traditions,which are, however, claimed to be extinct.4 It is the settler-coloniser,who—in this narrative—had to come and salvage, save, record and archivethe artefacts of the savage ignorant native which otherwise would havebeen lost forever.

Patrick Wolfe (1999, 2006) has characterised settler-colonialism as anongoing structure whose primary aim is the elimination of the nativeto secure settler control over the land. The ‘elimination of the native’takes various modalities: expulsion and killing, assimilation, and variousforms of discursive elimination. The Israeli regime has been exercisingdifferent modes of eliminating Naqab Bedouin presence: not only has thestate attempted to expel, displace and ethnically cleanse them (see Pappe2006), but there have also been assimilationist gestures (e.g. citizenshipand inclusion of the Bedouin in the army),5 as well as a whole set ofattempts discursively to eliminate them as natives of the land. The settler-colonial project of assimilation and elimination thus functions not only atthe material level (occupation and settlement of indigenous lands), but alsoat an epistemic level of knowledge production. If, however, elimination is

4 See Dinero (2002) for a more elaborate discussion of the Lahav Museum, and,among others, Boniface and Fowler (1993) or Nash (1996) for critical discussions inthe anthropology of tourism, heritage, folklore and museums in other contexts. Indeed,Clifford’s insightful analysis of museums as ‘contact zones’ (2013: 184) highlights thatmuseums, given the various funding pressures they are subjected to and the differentaudiences they cater to, are more than the objects they display. An in-depth analysis ofthe Museum would thus need to read it as a space of (different and varied) performances.Given the scope of this paper, I focus here not on the Museum itself (and the variousprocesses and dynamics that happen there), but on Naqab Bedouin women’s oral andembodied performances.

5 See Kanaaneh (2009) for a detailed discussion of Israeli assimilationist policies, inparticular the inclusion of Palestinian citizens of Israel, including the Naqab Bedouin, inthe Israeli army.


the aim of the settler-colonial project, why does the Museum present and‘preserve’ Bedouin culture and tradition?

Although the stated aim of the Museum—to preserve Bedouin cultureand tradition – might seem plausible at first, I argue that, in fact, it denies,erases – or ‘eliminates’ in Wolfe’s terms—the native. As such, it serves notto counter, but to execute the dual settler-colonial strategy of eliminationand assimilation. Israeli representations traditionally have relied on twomain strategies—Orientalist and modernist. Both narratives are alsocornerstones in the Museum’s display,6 where they perform their dualfunction of eliminating and assimilating. Modernist discourse assimilates—and thus also eliminates—the indigenous Bedouin community by‘civilising’ and ‘uplifting’ them to the standards of modernity: fromilliteracy to literacy, from oral to written, from live/performed torecorded/archived. Orientalist tropes eliminate Bedouin lived indigeneityby folklorising the indigenous community and presenting it as a dead,vanished thing from the past. Settler-colonial institutions, such as themuseum, or the archive, thus serve to ‘freeze’ the native, their livingtraditions, practices and memories, in an undefinable, vague, past (cf.Tedlock 1991, see also Barcham 2000: 142, Clifford 2013). NaqabBedouin lives as lived before 1948 are presented as gone forever. Theyare gone, because they were not written down. These kinds of epistemicerasures highlight the fact that settler-colonisation is not merely acolonisation of the land, but a much deeper project aimed at eradicatingthe native population, their lifestyle, habitus and knowledge.

With this understanding of settler-colonial epistemic erasures in mind,I focus in this article on the counter-narratives and representations asproduced embodied and enacted by the colonised themselves. Moreprecisely, I discuss Naqab Bedouin women’s oral and embodied traditions,and trace how they compare and provide a challenge to settler-colonialerasive representations of which the Museum is but one example. My datais drawn from the living oral and embodied traditions, such as dance,song or oral poetry, of Naqab Bedouin women (predominantly fromthe Nakba generation) which I heard and saw recited and performedduring my fieldwork in 2014 and 2015 in Rahat, Laqiya and Shqeeb as-Salam, three of the seven Bedouin townships. These women, who arepart of ca. 200,000 Naqab Bedouin Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel(Abu-Saad 2010) have faced different settler-colonial policies aimed ateliminating them as natives of the land. Not only has the state subjectedthem to various waves of military assaults, expulsion and displacement,eventually forcibly settling them in the townships from the late 1960sonwards, but also at the level of representation their lived indigeneity

6 Representations of the Naqab Bedouin have undergone important historical shifts;see Ratcliffe et al (2014).


has been denied. Yet, as I will argue, Bedouin women’s lived indigeneityis not extinct: through their performances of poetry, dance and songs,women continue, maintain, re-shape and, to a certain extent also transmit,indigenous memories, knowledges and ways of being—but in oral,embodied, not written and recorded ways. As such, oral and embodiedtraditions constitute an important challenge to the settler-colonial attemptat eliminating the native.

Sedentarisation and Education

Among the largest threats to Naqab Bedouin oral traditions areenforced sedentarisation/urbanisation and state-led centralist schoolingand education. Both are part and parcel of the Israeli ‘modernisation’project which started from the late 1960s onwards

With the establishment of Israel in 1948, the large majority of Bedouinfrom the Naqab region were expelled to Gaza, Jordan, the West Bank andEgypt. The ca. 11,000–13,000 who remained were placed under militarylaw, displaced from their ancestral lands and moved to an enclosure zone,the siyaj, in the Northern Naqab region (Marx 1967; Falah 1989). Aftermilitary rule, and from the late 1960s onwards, the Israeli state furtherexpropriated Naqab Bedouin land, restricted their pastoral and agriculturalactivities, and moved them into seven townships (Falah 1989), the largestof which is Rahat. The Bedouin have resisted this forced urbanisation:only ca. 50% have settled in townships. The other half continue to live ontheir land in villages that are unrecognised, and are under constant threatof demolition by the state. Both the forced concentration of the Bedouinin an enclosure zone during the military rule and the later policies ofsedentarisation are part and parcel of the Israeli settler-colonial project (seeFalah 1989; Yiftachel 2006, 2008; Nasasra 2012), in which the settler stateexpropriates Bedouin ancestral lands, transfers them to the Jewish settlermajority, and resettles Bedouin in reduced urban space with an extremelyhigh population density.

In the official Israeli discourse sedentarisation has been legitimised asa ‘development and modernisation project’, ‘freeing’ Bedouin from their‘backward’ ‘tribal’ norms and integrating them into the economic andpolitical structures of the modern nation-state. In order to achieve thisaim, the state established local councils in the townships, and taskedthe ‘Bedouin Development Authority’ and the ‘Bedouin EducationAuthority’ with the ‘development’ and ‘modernisation’ of the Bedouin.Through such institutions, the government claimed to provide moreefficient services, such as housing, roads, clinics, water, electricity,schooling, etc. The aim of forced sedentarisation and urbanisation—todiscipline and, to a certain extent, assimilate and thus eliminate—the


Naqab Bedouin as natives of the land was clearly expressed by MosheDayan in a 1963 Haaretz interview:

We should transform the Bedouin into an urban proletariat—in industry,services, construction, and agriculture. 88 per cent of the Israeli populationare not farmers; let the Bedouin be like them. Indeed this would be aradical move which means that the Bedouin would not live on his landwith his herds, but would become an urban person who comes home in theafternoon and puts his slippers on. His children would be accustomed to afather who wears trousers, does not carry a Shabaria [the traditional Bedouinknife] and does not search for vermin in public. The children would goto school with the hair properly combed. This would be a revolution,but it may be fixed within two generations. Without coercion but withgovernmental direction. . . this phenomenon of the Bedouin will disappear.(Moshe Dayan, Haaretz interview, 13 July 1963, quoted in Masalha2005: 125)

Presumably, the ‘disappearance’ referred to in Dayan’s last sentence in thisinterview extract is achieved as the Bedouin become modern, sedentarisedcitizens.7

Wolfe maintains that elimination can take various modalities, one ofwhich is assimilation. ‘Indeed, depending on the historical conjuncture,assimilation can be a more effective mode of elimination than conventionalforms of killing, since it does not involve such a disruptive affrontto the rule of law that is ideologically central to the cohesion ofsettler society’ (Wolfe 2006: 402). The Israeli state, by discriminatingagainst its Palestinian citizens, including the Naqab Bedouin, has, ofcourse, not adopted an assimilationist strategy in practice. Sedentarisationdid not result in more egalitarian structures, nor did it bring aboutdevelopment for the Bedouin. On the contrary: economic infrastructureand employment opportunities are lacking in the towns, and Bedouin menand women are not integrated into the labour market. If ‘modernisation’really had been the aim, the government would have needed to provideland bases, as it did for the Jewish moshavim and kibbutzim (see Masalha2005: 125). The language of ‘modernisation’ thus serves to disguise landexpropriation, resettlement and sedentarisation, which, in fact, all aim atexecuting the settler-colonial regime’s policies of denying and severelyrestricting native access to the land.

Wolfe (2006: 397) has maintained that one major tool in the settler-colonial assimilationist strategy is the isolation of the individual from thetribe, and—relatedly—the transferral of tribal land to individual property.The Israeli state’s programme of sedentarisation directed at the Bedouinaimed at achieving exactly that: In the townships, the government allowed

7 Israeli scholarship also often adopts a similar modernist approach, studying how‘traditional’ Bedouin adapt to the ‘modern’ urban environment (e.g. Meir, 1997).


Bedouin to purchase or lease a vacant lot to build according to their ownbudgets.8 Each smaller family unit thus became the owner of its individualproperty, a development which served to bury larger tribal land claims. Bytransforming Naqab Bedouin into private owners and establishing themas individual property-owning liberal subjects who, as citizens, entertain adirect contract through rights and duties with the state rather than withtribal or other affiliations, the process of eliminating the native proceeded.

Sedentarisation also had specific impacts on Bedouin women: whilesome, from the second and third generation, managed to enter thelabour market, mainly as school teachers or nurses, the great majoritywere transformed into housekeepers. The complete destruction of, andalienation from, their traditional lifestyle of semi-nomadic pastoralism,which included the cultivation of their lands, an activity in which womenhad played a significant role, has meant that their social, political andeconomic involvement has shrunk significantly in the townships (seeLewando-Hundt 1978; Abu Rabia Queder 2006; Dinero 2010).9 Moreimportantly for the focus of this paper, sedentarisation also threatenedto extinguish Bedouin women’s (and men’s) living embodied and oraltraditions: as contact among women became less and people stayedin houses with doors closed and had less free time, women’s sociallife suffered. While the more official rituals such as weddings stillprovide occasions for exchange, the frequency of occurrence of everydaydiscussions, recitals and performances of oral poetry and songs, like othertraditionally shared activities, has decreased.10

Alongside the process of sedentarisation, the Israeli state also startedto roll out a more comprehensive schooling and education system in theBedouin townships from the 1970s onwards.11 The implementation ofa centralist state-led schooling system cemented the shift from orality toliteracy among the Bedouin community in the Naqab.12 This is especiallytrue for women. While most of the Bedouin women who are old enough

8 Tell as-Saba, the first township built in the late 1960 employed a different model, inwhich the government built houses for Bedouin families.

9 Sedentarisation had gender-specific impacts not only in the Naqab. See e.g. Abu-Lughod (1986/1999; 1993) on the Awlad ‘Ali in Egypt, Seeley (2013) on Jordan or Chatty(2013).

10 Abu Athera (1995), studying tribal poetry of the Tarabin and Huwaytat tribes, foundsimilar links between sedentarisation and decrease in oral traditions.

11 Education, as such, was not an entirely new phenomenon: while the BritishMandate had already established schools (mainly for sons of sheikhs and notables), mostschools in the South were closed during the Israeli military period, and Bedouins had toobtain special permission for education and employment from the military authorities (seeAbu Rabia Queder 2006, 2008; Abu Saad 2001).

12 Orality and literacy are not to be regarded in fixed binaries; they co-exist, in thecurrent context of the Naqab as elsewhere. The Naqab Bedouin, however, until recentlyconstituted a largely oral community, with only very few male leaders having acquired


to have experienced the Nakba as young girls are illiterate, many of theirdaughters and most of their granddaughters received schooling if theygrew up in one of the seven Bedouin townships.

The question of whether and how education contributes to increasingthe possibilities for women to lead a better life has dominated genderand development approaches.13 A liberal modernist position argues thateducation is key to women’s empowerment, and such a stance is alsooften taken with regard to Naqab Bedouin women (see e.g. Abu-RabiaQueder 2006; Pessate-Schubert 2004). Some studies, however, point tomore ambiguous dynamics (Abu Rabia Queder 2008; Abu Saad 2001),highlighting, for example, that what matters is not merely access, butrather the quality and nature of the education. In the Naqab, schools areinsufficiently staffed and lack space and facilities. The quality of educationthat Naqab Bedouin students, both boys and girls, obtain is much lowerthan that offered in Jewish schools. Young Bedouin women thus do notgraduate from high school equipped to compete in the labour market ofthe Jewish state.

Moreover, implicit in the modernist project of schooling is a fixingof hierarchies: educated over uneducated, literate over illiterate, etc. The2005 Arab Human Development Report (UNDP 2005), for example,celebrates education as being the path to women’s empowerment, andplaces those without schooling at the lower end of what it constructsas a human hierarchy. It finds that those without schooling ‘are unableto read or write and thus express themselves—and have never heard oftheir human rights. This erodes their very human status’ (UNDP 2005:119, quoted in Abu-Lughod 2009: 88). In communities such as thoseof the Naqab, which have experienced the transition to education andliteracy for all within a condensed period of time, the younger educatedgenerations sometimes adopt a similar derogatory attitude towards thosewho have not benefitted from schooling (see Abu-Lughod 1993: 205–42;Abu-Lughod 2009: 87).

Many of the younger girls and women that I met in the Bedouintownships tended to pay little attention to the oral histories of theirmothers and grandmothers, sometimes dismissing them as untrue, andtheir illiteracy as a sign of ‘unawareness’ and ‘backwardness’. Given the

schooling. The shift from orality to literacy thus is particularly pronounced along the linesof generation and gender in the Naqab.

13 Liberal assumptions tend to make several positive causal links between education andwomen’s ‘empowerment’, such as, for example, that rising female education correlates withless population growth, fertility rates and child mortality. The Fourth World Conferenceon Women in Beijing in 1995, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000, aswell as the AHDR (UNDP 2005) all argue that women’s literacy and education is key toempowering women.


younger generations’ education in Israeli state schooling and sometimesalso university,14 the contrast not only between the modes of knowledgeproduction and transmission (oral/written) but also the factual contentof the different generations’ narratives is marked. Younger women wouldoften dismiss my wish to hear from older women about their memoriesand lived experiences of the Nakba, of the subsequent military rule andof the sedentarisation period. Rather than listening to the gibberish ofthe older women, many young people told me, I should read books orvisit the Museum in Lahav. The books they directed me to were eitherwritten by local folklorists, some of which fall into the trap of self-Orientalising,15 or by Israeli scholars, which largely deny the existenceof the Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing, expulsion and elimination ofthe native population during the Nakba and subsequent periods. Amongthe younger generation, the state’s project to install modernist values thatprioritise the written over the oral has thus started to take hold.

In the Naqab the state-led modernist project of schooling andsedentarisation has forced a sudden shift from orality to literacy,rendering the Bedouin indigenous oral traditions, knowledges and modesof knowledge production invalid in the new ‘modern’ system. Oralembodied traditions in this modernist understanding are deemed untrueand valueless, because they are ‘just oral’—not written down, notregistered, not recorded, not archived and displayed in the museum.The museum, where indigenous artefacts are categorised according toa Western concept of heritage is thus but one institution serving thesettler-colonial project of eliminating the native. Smallacombe (2000: 160)discussing the instrumentalisation and folklorisation of Aboriginal art andculture in Australian nation-building has argued that ‘[w]estern conceptsof heritage are based in the construction of hierarchies and classificationsthat are imposed, through colonising process on the knowledge andcultural systems of indigenous peoples, thus rendering them subordinateto Western systems.’

Additionally to museums and other heritage institutions, schools anduniversities can also form an important part in this colonising process: byfixing meanings and epistemes, state-led schooling, education and literacy

14 More recently Naqab Bedouin students, especially girls, have enrolled in Palestinianuniversities in the West Bank, especially Hebron. Whether and how this trend mightimpact on this generation’s historical and political narratives and identifications in thefuture deserves further scholarly attention, but is hard to determine at the moment.

15 See e.g. Salih Ziyadna’s two folkloristic books on Naqab Bedouin women (2014a)and Naqab Bedouin music and song (2014b). For a similar dynamic in contexts other thanthe Naqab, see Prager (2012) who analyses what she terms ‘Auto-Orientalism’, Büssow(2012) who researched written Bedouin tribal history books in Syria, and Shryock (1997)on Bedouin tribal history in Jordan.


entails a homogenisation of thought and modes of expression—one thatreaffirms and strengthens the settler-colonial system and places Bedouinknowledges and ways of being in a subordinate, or even claimed as extinct,position. As such literacy does not necessarily mean development or‘empowerment’, but rather allows for increased state control.

‘The Repertoire’ of Arab Oral Traditions

Although the shift to literacy enforced through state-led schoolingand sedentarisation constitutes a severe challenge for Bedouin orality,and for the maintenance and transmission of indigenous knowledgesand subjectivities contained within this episteme, these have not beeneliminated altogether. Oral and embodied traditions continue to be recitedand performed and are being adapted, re-shaped and endowed with newmeanings in the changing context. Bedouin women, particularly fromthe older generations, have a wealth of short poems at the tip of theirtongues, and are always ready to comment on different situations, suchas the arrival of guests, problems between husband and wife, unrulychildren, disputes between families, memories of the past, and much more.Rather than being unaware, backward and having had their human status‘eroded’, as the AHDR claims, these illiterate women demonstrate withtheir eloquent comments and critiques a wealth of information and skillsfor communicating within and shaping their community. Abu-Lughodput this succinctly in her critique of the AHDR:

The many articulate, creative, witty, and sharp uneducated women I haveknown in rural Egypt (granted living in less dire circumstances than thosedeplored in the report for the poorest and most marginal groups)—womenwho are creative poets and storytellers, astute moral reasoners, energeticparticipants in their community’s social and political affairs, and quick tobristle at infringements of their customary or religious rights—would besurprised to hear that they or their daughters are less than human. (Abu-Lughod 2009: 87–88)

Oral traditions, poetry and song, form a central part of Bedouin, as wellas more broadly Arab, everyday social worlds and interactions (see Abu-Lughod 1986/1999: 237–8). They are performed in everyday scenarios aswell as in the more ritualised settings, in which the younger also regularlyparticipate. Oral traditions in the Arab world have been studied extensivelyby folklorists and literary scholars who have tended to put emphasis onthe poem’s content and narrative.16 In contrast to this, and in line with

16 There is a rich literature on Arab oral traditions. Folktales, songs, proverbs, andpoetry have been studied by, for example Granquist (1931), Bushnaq (1987) or Muhawiand Kanaana (1989).


anthropological, ethno-musicological and performance-based studies,17

the approach that I am following here places oral traditions in theireveryday social and political context and emphasises their performed (andperformative) aspect. Oral traditions are both discursive and performativeformations. Discourse here is not confined to a narrow linguistic approach,but rather refers, in Foucault’s (1980) sense, to oral or speech acts as wellas to practices, beliefs and ideas, which together constitute a discoursewhich serves to structure and construct women’s subjectivities and theirworlds. The term ‘performance’ is also adopted in its widest sense, i.e.not as Goffman (1959/1990) would use it as referring to individualsrationally ‘performing’ behaviours to conform to social standards andnorms, but rather stressing the performative role that oral, sonic andembodied performances play in constituting individual and communalidentities. Performances and articulations of living oral and embodiedtraditions thus are, as Clifford has remarked, ‘less a matter of preservingtraditions for the salvage ‘record’ than of enacting them in new socialcontexts—a new gathering up of the self in a mode of engagement’(2013: 174).

More specifically, I am interested in the social and particularly politicalfunctions that indigenous oral and embodied traditions can play in acontext of settler-colonial policies of erasure, such as that directed at theNaqab Bedouin. To what extent and how can Bedouin living traditions—as non-exclusively verbal, but also embodied and performative discursiveformations that shape and re-make indigenous communities—challengeor even resist different modes of epistemic settler-colonial violence? AsI argue below, these lived oral and embodied performances can and doprovide a dual challenge to the Israeli settler-colonial project aimed ateliminating the native. Women’s songs and oral poetry not only containvery valuable historical details and memories of the past (e.g. details ofspecific places, lands, values, historical events, etc.), but they also function,in a very different way than written or recorded sources do, as embodied,live systems of learning, storing, and transmitting indigenous knowledgesand memories (see Taylor 2003). One of the striking differences betweenthe recorded, written archive and the oral and embodied traditions of theNaqab Bedouin is that the latter do not freeze the Bedouin in a foregonepast but instead they maintain, enact, adapt and reshape indigenousknowledges and modes of knowledge production in the here and nowwith a view to the future. These living traditions perform, as Clifford(2013) put it, the process of ‘becoming indigenous in the twenty-firstcentury’.

17 See e.g. Abu-Lughod (1986/1999: 186); Meeker (1979); Seeley (2013).


In her 2003 book The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing CulturalMemory in the Americas, Diana Taylor stresses the importance of oralityand embodied performances, such as dance, oral poetry, or songs, forthe maintenance and transmission of cultural memory and knowledge,especially among indigenous peoples.18 Performance, according to Taylor,‘functions as an episteme, a way of knowing, not simply an objectof analysis’ (Taylor 2003: 182)19. She employs the term ‘repertoire’to explain the crucial and unique features of embodied and/or oralperformances:

The repertoire, [in contrast to the archive], enacts embodied memory:performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short, allthose acts usually thought of as ephemeral, non reproducible knowledge.[. . . ] The repertoire requires presence: people participate in the productionand reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there’, being a part of thetransmission. As opposed to the supposedly stable objects in the archive,the actions that are the repertoire do not remain the same. The repertoireboth keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning. (Taylor 2002: 603)

Oral and embodied traditions are thus live and living performances,not frozen, displayed artefacts in the museum. Each performance isdifferent; it is improvised according to who is present, who is performing,which historical context the performance takes place in, and many othervariables.

Flexibility and Adaptability

The flexibility of oral narratives is well captured by one of the small songsthat Hajja Fatima,20 one of the grandmothers in my host family in Rahat,sang on various occasions. Hajja Fatima was born some years before 1948in the Western Naqab, close to what is now the border to Gaza and theErez checkpoint, where her father had, as she told me, vast agriculturallands. In 1948 she was, together with her family, expelled from theirancestral lands and became a refugee in Gaza. Here she grew up, playingan important role in the family economy through her work as a seamstressand raising her four brothers, given an illness of her mother. After the1967 war she married back into the Naqab, like many Bedouin women ofher generation who were expelled to Gaza in 1948.

18 For approaches based in performance studies additional to Taylor’s, see, amongothers, Turner (1987), Roach (1996) or Schechner (1995).

19 All references to Taylor (2002) are kindle locations, not page numbers.20 All informants’ names have been changed to guarantee their anonymity.


The basic line of this short sung poetry is the following:

Mandeeli, mandeeli, ya Abu Mohammad, mandeeli21

Mandeeli [my headscarf], mandeeli, Abu Muhammad, mandeeliAlbas akwa arawih asaafir cal-khaleeli

I wear it and go travelling to Khalil [Hebron]

And some of the variations I heard were:

Shashaati, shashaati, ya Abu Mohammad, shashaatiShashaati [white scarf worn by older Bedouin women], shashaati, AbuMuhammad, shashaati

Albasakwaarawih asaafir cal-bashaatiI wear it and go travelling to the Pasha

or:

Jakeeti, jakeeti, ya Abu Muhammad jakeetiMy jacket, my jacket, Abu Mohammad, my jacket

Albasakwaarawih asaafir cal-KuwaitiI wear it and go travelling to Kuwait

The basic melody and the song’s simple but different end rhymes testifyto it, most probably, being a long-lived, versatile and adaptive tradition.All women who knew and sang this song explained to me that theyhad learned it from their mother or grandmothers as young children. Itthus seems plausible to assume that women have sung it in the past andhave adapted it to different historical moments. Al-Khaleel (Hebron) stillconstitutes an important economic centre for the Naqab Bedouin, eventhough it is now formally within the Occupied Palestinian Territories andcan only be reached by crossing Israeli border checkpoints (see Parizot2004; 2006); the reference to the Pasha in the second verse providessome historical dimension, probably taken from Ottoman times, whilethe destination of Kuwait in the last verse takes the listener to the periodof modern nation-states in the Middle East. Oral traditions such as thisone thus are flexible, they can be adapted to time and space.

This means that oral traditions, contrary to representations in themuseum or archive, also resist essentialisation. The Lahav Museum Ivisited provides a good example of such an essentialist imagination of theBedouin. Already its name—the Museum of Bedouin Culture—stressesthe Bedouin as a frozen, separate and distinctive community, differentfrom other urban or rural Palestinians and with their own ‘Bedouin’ asopposed to Palestinian culture. Bedouin distinctiveness is also often upheldin scholarly works. Early anthropological works on Bedouin culture

21 I have adopted a simplified transliteration system without diacritics that seeks toapproximate the Naqab Bedouin dialect as used in the songs and poems.


(e.g. Marx 1967; Kressel 1992) as well as those on Bedouin poetry and oraltraditions (Bailey 2002) often rely on such essentialising, orientalising andfolklorising stances (see Ratcliffe et al 2014). For example, Clinton Bailey’sfoundational work on Naqab Bedouin poetry (2002), whilst providing avery rich source on mainly men’s oral poetry in different pre-1948 periods,fails to mention how this poetry evolved after the Bedouin were subjectedto Israeli settler-colonial policies, nor does it establish the links betweenBedouin and other Palestinian communities’ oral traditions. Bailey’s work,by focusing on Bedouin warfare, tribal structures and honour codesas contained in Bedouin poetry thus reinforces Bedouin distinctivenessand overall remains caught in an Orientalist de-politicised analyticalframe.

Such Orientalist stances negate the fact that the Naqab Bedouin werean integral part of and identified with the pre-1948 Palestinian communityand space. Failing to contextualise Bedouin Palestinian traditions, theyreinforce and feed into Israel’s ‘divide and rule’ policies. Most of theBedouin women from the Nakba generation to whom I spoke referredregularly to ‘Ayyam Falasteen’ or ‘Ayam al-Blad—the days of Palestine—when speaking of their pre-48 life. Although there were, of course,differences in lifestyle and customs, Naqab Bedouin from the Nakbageneration consider themselves as part of historic Palestine and its socialand political community. Until today they maintain a clear attachmentto the land, a land that they themselves designate as Palestine. They alsospeak of the various economic, social, cultural and political links that theyentertained, and continue to nourish, with other Palestinian communities(see also Parizot 2004, 2006).

This becomes apparent when one looks at women’s popular nationalsongs (aghani wataniyya)22 which in today’s Naqab are sung andremembered particularly, but not exclusively, by Naqab Bedouin womenwho, like Hajja Fatima, grew up in Gaza.23 In Gaza many women from thisgeneration spent their youth in refugee camps, or the towns and villagesof Egypt-administered Gaza, where the atmosphere of national resistancewas omnipresent and was more publically expressed than was possible inthe Naqab under Israeli military rule. When, after the 1967 war, refugeeNaqab Bedouin women married back from Gaza into what had becomeIsrael, they brought the aghani wataniyya with them. It is therefore theNaqab Bedouin women who grew up in Gaza and later ‘returned’ to the

22 Most aghani wataniya that I heard were sung in the melodies and genres of whatwomen referred to as cala-dal coona, short rhythmic songs with a clearly identifiable melody.On that type of song, see e.g. Ghadban (2002).

23 See also Nasasra (2014: 137) who refers to a case of Naqab Bedouin womensinging aghani wataniyya under the military rule to protect Bedouin refugees who hadbeen displaced across the border to Jordan but were trying to return to their lands.


Naqab through marriage practices who today are most likely still to know,sing and recite aghani wataniyya. These small songs often contain veryspecific references to different places and sites of historical importanceeverywhere in Palestine, not just the very crowded urban spaces in theNaqab to which the Israeli regime has forcibly confined these women’slives over the last decades.

Hajja Fatima, for example, sang the following song:

Yahrim calayylabismandeel al-ghazzaWearing the beautiful headscarf is forbidden to me

ili qatalooshuhada ghazaBecause of the martyrs who were killed in Gaza

Yahrim calayyqus ash-shaleeshCutting my hair is forbidden to me

ili qataloo fi ‘ard al-areeshBecause of those who were killed in the lands of al-Arish

Yahrim calayytazhir al-khirqaColouring [a special kind of] scarf is forbidden to me

ili qataloo fi barqaBecause of those who were killed in Barqa

Yahrim calai labis mandeelWearing the headscarf is forbidden to me

ili qataloo fi-‘ard al-khaleelBecause of those who were killed in the lands of Hebron

Yahrim calayy al-kohl fi-l- cainWearing kohl on my eyes is forbidden to me

ili qataloo fi wadi hneenBecause of those who were killed in Wadi Hneen.

This song, similarly to the one cited before, demonstrates the flexibilityof oral sung poetry through its changing end rhymes. Moreover, thesong’s references to different places, most of which are towns and villagesnow renamed in Hebrew and largely out of reach for most NaqabBedouin women, strongly contest the Israeli divide and rule policies whichseparate and control Palestinian spaces and communities with the aim offragmenting and weakening their national cohesion. Bedouin women hadand have strong connections to different places everywhere in the Naqab,not just the townships that they are forced to reside in now. The factthat multiple forced displacements and continuous interactions betweenBedouin, rural and urban Palestinian communities are mirrored in today’sNaqab Bedouin mixed and hybrid repertoire of oral sung poetry shouldfunction as a reminder to be wary of claims of Bedouin authenticity ordistinctiveness. Naqab Bedouin traditions, despite their unique features,form an integral part of the larger repertoire of Palestinian oral traditions.This connectedness is further reinforced by the fact that the song sungby Hajja Fatima forcefully reminds the listener of the Israeli attacks on


different Palestinian villages and towns in 1948, naming each of these withtheir original Arabic names and highlighting their political significance forthe entire Palestinian population, no matter whether Bedouin, rural orurban.

Counter-Narratives

The repertoire of Bedouin women’s songs and poems provideoral counter-narratives to hegemonic Israeli history-writing. Womenremember and continue to mention Arabic place names, their memoriesand lived experiences of 1948, their ties to other Palestinian communities,as well as their own presence on the land. It is, in particular, with regardsto the Bedouin land struggle that the settler-colonial regime has tried todominate knowledge production by fortifying an image of the Bedouinas roaming nomads without links (and consequently claims and rights)to their native lands. The regime’s strategy of nomadising the Bedouinwas also evident in the Museum’s display, which includes one sectionentitled ‘bedouin agriculture in the Negev’. The exhibited material (acamel plough and other basic agricultural tools) gave the impression ofprimitive, inefficient Bedouin use of the land and thus implicitly celebratesthe settlers as those who had to come to ‘make the desert bloom’. Inmy interview with one of the Museum’s Israeli-Jewish staff members thisrepresentation was further reinforced:

Before the first world war the Bedouin here and in Jordan and in Syria theywere nomads and they used to travel [. . . ] from the Negev up to Syria,Lebanon, down [to] Jordan, all the way down to Amman, and back upagain. And that could take between 3 and 5 years. (Interview, Museum forBedouin Culture 2015)

Representations in the Museum (as well as in other public Israeliinstitutions) turn the native Naqab Bedouins who cultivated their ancestrallands into rootless nomads. As roaming nomads, the Bedouin not onlyconstitute the ideal exotic Other for the colonialist (i.e. ‘the savage inneed of civilising’), but also more specifically for the settler-colonialist.Wolfe notes:

The new Jew’s formative Other was the nomadic Bedouin rather than thefellaheen farmer. The reproach of nomadism renders the native removable.Moreover, if the natives are not already nomadic, then the reproach can beturned into a self-fulfilling prophecy through the burning of corn or theuprooting of fruit trees. (Wolfe 2006: 396)

As Wolfe confirms, it is only certain kinds of natives, those that provenative presence on and usage of the land, that need to be eliminated in thesettler-colonial narrative. This elimination should not be understood as


proving settler unawareness of the Naqab Bedouin’s agricultural activities.Settlers knew, and know, that the Bedouin had delineated tribal lands, andwere engaged in agriculture, crop farming, and other rural activities (seee.g. Nasasra 2012; Amara, unpublished). Zionists of the second Aliya, suchas Israel Balkind for example, even urged young Zionists to seek Bedouin‘advice on agriculture and herding’ (Pappe 2014: 75, referencing Sadan2006: 105–13). The fact that the Bedouin were not strictly nomadic, butcultivated their tribal lands, however, had to be erased. To do so, Israeliforces did indeed burn some Bedouin families’ crops in 1948 and after, asseveral Nakba generation Bedouin women told me.

References to tribal lands and agricultural activities are not onlycontained in oral history testimonies, but also in Bedouin oral poetry. Forexample, the following 2-hemistichs line from an iqtaar, a specific traditionof Bedouin women’s poetry sung in a monotone voice with long-stretchedvowels, functions as a reminder of the lands of the Tiyaha tribe:

atTiyahawazracoo al-‘ard (or al-blaad)min ghaza l-al-areesha waghaad

The Tiyaha were farming the landfrom Gaza to al-Arish and further

This line of the iqtaar makes not only specific reference to Palestinianplace names, but also confirms Bedouin tribal control over and agriculturalusage of the land, thus providing a powerful counter-narrative to settler-colonial representations of the Naqab Bedouin as roaming rootlessnomads.

In addition to such specific references to historical events, place namesand pastoral, rural lifestyles, the Naqab Bedouin women’s sung oral poetrycontains intimate memories that speak about social connectedness acrosslater constructed national borders, or functions as reminders of how lifewas like before forced sedentarisation. Two short poems that I heard invarious versions sung by different women illustrate this:

Al-yoomahlim al-layali tan ceedzaykaanToday I am dreaming that the nights return as they used to be

Wa aruh ghaza wa waqf fi krum al-khaanAnd I go to Gaza and sit in the orchards of Khan (Yunis)

and:

Yamaq cad al-beitwa-l-humumkthaarYou who stays inside and has many worries

Tala cti fi-l-khalla (or variation: srihti al-ghanam) btawal al- comaarIf you go out in the open (or variation: if you graze the sheep),that lengthens life.


These short poems actualise and bring alive Bedouin traditions,memories and histories in a very different way than the frozenrepresentations displayed in the Museum. Not only do these recitalsspeak of intimate relations to specific—including urban—places (inGaza), but also of a different relationship with land and space, onethat the Naqab Bedouin were so violently robbed of by Israeli settler-colonial dispossession, sedentarisation and urbanisation policies. The songscontradict the Israeli modernist developmentalist discourse, which depictsthe settler-colonialists as civilisers, as those developing and uplifting theignorant natives to the standards of modernity by sedentarising them andrecording and preserving their traditional lives, lives now claimed to beextinct. In contradiction to this claim, the content of these women’s songsproves that women harbour and cherish their memories of a pre-urbanisedlife, and continue to advocate, to the extent possible, a life not restrictedto idleness in the urban confines of houses, walls and streets but ratherfi-l-khalla, in the ‘open’.

Continuity and Resistance

The importance of women’s indigenous oral and embodied traditions (incontradistinction to the archive) lies in their performativity and actuality.Actuality means that performed oral traditions are irreproducible: theycan never be repeated in exactly the same way. As a constantly evolving,but culturally-specific episteme, embodied, performed and oral traditionscontain a certain informality and ambiguity.

It is probably for this reason that most women I spoke to and spent timewith preferred to relate politically-sensitive information or their memoriesof traumatic events, such as Israel’s atrocities in 1948 or after, through songor poetry rather than regular speech. Many women were at first reluctantto talk directly about events of 1948 and their past, but later revealedtheir political awareness and expressed their barbed political commentsand critique through several short songs. They knew and recited to meoral sung poetry which covered a range of topics and events, and werenot only about 1948, but also about the Sabra and Shatila massacre, aboutMoshe Dayan and even Sharon.

In a context such as that of the Naqab Bedouin in Israel, where statecontrol and censorship is prevalent, oral and performed traditions acquirean important socio-political role.24 Most Naqab Bedouin have lived alltheir lives under omnipresent and harsh Israeli control and censorship,particularly during the military period (see Sa’di 2013). Political silencing,

24 Studies in other contexts have similarly shown that it is often through song and oralpoetry, not regular speech, that politically oppressed groups express oppositional politicalsentiments (see e.g. Kanakis 2013, on the Kurds in Turkey).


including self-censorship, has therefore, to a certain extent, becomeembedded in Naqab Bedouin socio-cultural structures and codes ofcommunication. The fact that Naqab Bedouin women continue to expresspolitical critique through a channel other than regular speech, points to afunctioning of the song and orality as ‘anti-structural’, i.e. running counterto the Israeli-imposed hegemonic system of control and censorship.25 Thisanti-structural function is particularly true for women’s oral poetry. Giventhat in Bedouin society it is usually men who take the role of authoritativepublic speakers, women’s use of song and poetry to make their voicesheard is doubly anti-structural, challenging and finding ways around bothgendered and political control.

Colonial powers have historically shown a great discomfort with ‘therepertoire’ of those they colonise. Oral traditions, but also embodied andvocal performances, are flexible and context-dependent. Their meanings,interpretations and perceptions differ from one performance, from oneviewer, from one context to the next. This makes them both more difficultto censor and harder to decipher for colonialist powers (Taylor 2003).With their ‘repertoire’ the oppressed and colonised are able to evadecolonial or state censorship more easily than they could with fixed writtensources (Taylor 2003: 559).

Songs, however, are not only flexible and informal and as such harderto control, but they are also ambiguous and difficult to understand. Thelanguage used in sung poetry is highly symbolic and tends to be saturatedwith rare and idiosyncratic terms. Combined with the performance-basedelement of oral traditions, i.e. the embodied, corporeal and culturally-specific codes of performances, this channel of communication oftenremains undecipherable for outsiders. Diana Taylor explains the importantindigenous resistance strategy of indecipherability in the following way:

Indecipherability [. . . ] has long been a strategy for combating the exigenciesthat everything be transparent, available for immediate decoding. Ambiguitysubverts the demand for decipherability and strict compliance. In a socialsituation demanding strict gender and sexual formation as integral to thepolitical performance of national ‘being’, not being available for easy readingwas both a danger and a form of civil disobedience. (Taylor 2002: 3926)

Naqab Bedouin women’s embodied codes, whether enacted throughoral performances, song or dance in everyday life or in ritualised settings

25 I borrow here from Abu-Lughod’s analysis of the Awlad ‘Ali’s ghinnawa. Abu-Lughod describes the ghinnawa, a ‘poetry of personal sentiment’ (Abu-Lughod 1986/1999:181), as ‘anti-structural’, i.e. as functioning as ‘the discourse of opposition to the system’(1986/1999: 251). My analysis is, however, less concerned with the question of whetherand how women’s songs and poetry are ‘anti-structural’ to Bedouin cultural codes, butrather traces the ways in which these living traditions might transgress, challenge and resistIsraeli political censorship and control.


contain a wealth of knowledges and information that are not easy to access,understand and decipher. What is clear, however, even to an outsider, isthat these living traditions do contain not only narratives, but also specificcorporeal codes that are different to and even opposed to those that theIsraeli state tries to impose on this indigenous community through itsurbanisation and schooling projects. Taylor’s notion of the ‘repertoire’ goesbeyond a simplistic divide of the written vs. the oral to also include andstress the importance of the body, the performed and the lived, which,just as oral speech, can maintain higher degrees of flexibility, ambiguityand indecipherability than the written and recorded:

The repertoire, whether in terms of verbal or nonverbal expression, transmitslive, embodied actions. As such, traditions are stored in the body, throughvarious mnemonic methods, and transmitted ‘live’ in the here and nowto a live audience. Forms handed down from the past are experienced aspresent. Although this may well describe the mechanics of spoken language,it also describes a dance recital or a religious festival. It is only becauseWestern culture is wedded to the word, whether written or spoken, thatlanguage claims such epistemic and explanatory power. The writing =memory/knowledge equation is central to Western epistemology. (Taylor2003: 668)

Performances thus transmit values, knowledges and memories in anembodied way in the here and now, live. Most women and men whopractice the Naqab Bedouin ‘repertoire’ of oral and performed traditionsare very aware of the importance of the body for cultural, political andsocial memory and transmission. Khaled, for example, a rababa26 player inhis mid-40s from Laqiya, expressed this aspect well when I interviewedhim after he had recited various oral traditions in a gathering in Rahat in2014:

If a human being has in his hands the rababa, he has substance, morals,gallantry, noble-mindedness, self-worth.. . . This is what distinguishes us andwe must look after it. Not just look through photo albums, and that’s it. Thislife must be with us. I want this culture to live, and to last as well, and passfrom generation to generation. . . It’s something we’re proud of. (Interview,Khaled, Rahat 2014)

Oral embodied traditions are not only living cultures that establish thepeople of the community themselves as tellers of their own past, presentand future, but they also form and construct that community. Playing therababa establishes the player (the one who ‘has in his hands the rababa’) assomeone specific and significant (someone with ‘morals, gallantry’, etc.).In a performance, these modes of being are not merely communicated,but also taught and transmitted live to the listener, who, in this process,

26 The rababa is a bowed string instrument.


can learn to perform and decipher the different culturally-specific, oftenambiguous, codes contained within the tradition. The audience thus isnot simply the recipient of information, as might be more strongly thecase in writing, but rather is implicated directly in the act of performance,and, as such, becomes a participant and a witness to both the process ofknowledge transmission and that of maintaining, constructing, and (re-)shaping the community.

Naqab Bedouin women, particularly but not exclusively those fromthe Nakba generation, have maintained their flexible repertoire oftraditionswhich rely on the live, the oral and the performed/practiced,rather than the recorded, the archived and the text. It is the flexibility,actuality and ambiguity inherent in these traditions which has enabledthem to maintain their own indigenous spaces of social and political poweroutside of, and alternative to, settler-colonial state control. By relyingon their culturally-specific episteme of performed and oral traditions,Bedouin women counteract and resist the coloniser’s project of shelvingaway safely their lives, knowledges and modes of being in the museumor archive. The attempt to shift the Bedouin oral community to therealm of the written, recorded and registered through schooling, surveyingand archiving is thus less about modernising, but rather aims to expandcolonial power and erase Bedouin lived indigeneity. It strives to make theindigenous community legible, and, as such, also more easily manageable,controllable and governable. What is presented as ‘modernisation’ in factmeans assimilation and elimination: once his/her outlook has been shiftedto embrace fully the episteme of the written and registered, the native,whose subjectivity relies on and is constituted by orality and performancerather than script, would cease to exist, as he/she has now becomepart of modernity. The Naqab Bedouin women’s repertoire, however,continues to carry and enact their lived embodied indigeneity. It bringsalive, performs, and constructs communities and selves very differentfrom the sedentarised, docile and decipherable subjects that the Israelimodernisation project aims for.

Conclusion

Naqab Bedouin have faced—historically and today—various settler-colonial practices and discourses aimed at eliminating them. Not onlydid the Israeli army brutally attack, kill and expel them in 1948, butalso later, during military rule, they were displaced from their ancestrallands and concentrated into a segregation zone in the Northern Naqab.These policies of dispossession and land grab continued with Israelisedentarisation policies from the 1970s onwards, and are still enforced


today through the state’s attempted forced removal of Bedouin residentsfrom their lands in the unrecognised villages.

Additionally to such material settler-colonial policies aimed attransferring native land to the settlers, the Israeli settler-colonial regimealso works at an epistemic level towards eliminating the native. It isone particular native that needs to be erased: the one with links tothe land. Through Orientalist narratives depicting Naqab Bedouins asroaming nomads who neither entertained links to the land, nor wereable efficiently to make use of it, but also through promoting modernistrepresentations that claim an assimilation and integration of the NaqabBedouin into the structures of the modern nation-state, thus de-nativisingthem, the discursive strategy of eliminating the native proceeds. Themode of knowledge production used to master this strategy is thewritten and recorded, implemented through centralised state-led (or state-funded) institutions such as archives, museums, schools or universities.The written, as a central element of Western modernity, is in this contextalso, as de Certeau has claimed, ‘colonial in principle’ (1988: 216), as, incontrast to orality, it not only ‘preserves the past’ but also ‘conquers spaceby multiplying the same signs’. The indigenous ‘repertoire’ (Taylor 2003)of performed and oral traditions, on the other hand, depends on the live:it cannot be expanded, exported or multiplied in the same form.

Nevertheless, and despite this seeming superiority of the writtenover the oral and performed, I have argued in this paper that NaqabBedouin women, by maintaining and re-crafting their own alternativespaces in which they continue to practice their community’s indigenous‘repertoire’, challenge the expansionist settler-colonial project aimed ateffacing them. Of course, women with their oral sung poetry or otherembodied performances cannot reverse the material dispossession thattheir community has suffered and continues to suffer at the hands of thesettler-colonial regime, nor can they actually dismantle the archive. Butthey can curb its expansionist reach, and its aim of erasing Naqab Bedouinlived indigeneity. Women’s songs and oral poetry contest the Israeli officialdiscourse directly, by providing very valuable, historical counter-narratives(such as references to Palestine, to Bedouin tribal lands, to specific places,norms, events, and lived experiences and memories of their pre-urbanisedand pre-1948 lives, etc.). But beyond the narrative, they also function asembodied systems of learning, teaching, storing, and, to a certain extent,of transmitting indigenous knowledge. The corporeal and oral modes ofknowledge production which women use in this process are both difficultto censor and to decipher for the coloniser. As such, Bedouin womenfrom the Nakba generation have managed to evade the colonisation oftheir bodies and of their own orality and of their performance-baseddiscursive spaces. They have not been de-nativised, and their indigenous


subjectivities have not been eliminated, but rather are in a ‘process ofbecoming’ (Clifford, 2013: 7), of being constantly remade.

One urgent question arises: there is a need to enquire as to whetherthis analysis also holds true for younger generations. With sedentarisationand comprehensive schooling, but also with the influence of the digitalrevolution, what role can indigenous embodied and oral knowledges ofthe Naqab Bedouin still play in challenging and resisting settler-colonialrepresentations and practices aimed at erasing them? It is certainly truethat writing and digital communication (which both relies on but canalso replace writing) has taken hold in the younger generations. But thisdoes not mean that embodied and oral performances no longer exist, northat they have become insignificant in the transmission and constitutionof Naqab Bedouin social memory, knowledge and identity. Rather, thefact that Naqab Bedouin rely on a mix of written, oral, digital andembodied performed modes and codes of communication highlights thatsimplistic binaries of oral vs. written, traditional vs. modern, and backwardvs. progressive cannot capture the complex, creative and innovative waysthrough which indigenous peoples shape and remake their communities.

Yet, it remains crucial to trace the particular function that oral andembodied traditions perform in this process of ‘indigenous becoming’.Clifford (2013: 28) suggests the notion of indigenous ‘historical practice’which, he argues, can:

help expand our range of attention, allowing us to take seriously theclaims of oral transmission, genealogy, and ritual processes. These embodied,practical ways of representing the past have not been considered fully,realistically, historical by modern ideologies that privilege literacy andchronology. Historical practice can act as a translation tool for rethinking“tradition,” a central process of indigenous survival and renewal.

Taylor (2003: 960), who similarly is interested in the role that thebody, ritual, performance and practice play in historical transmission, haspointed out one important comparative advantage of the ‘repertoire’ overthe ‘archive’. She argues that the ‘repertoire’, given its live performanceand enactment, not only represents (i.e. functions as something), butalso presents, i.e. it enacts and constitutes—and thus is something inand of itself. Butler’s understanding that gender identity is ‘an identitytenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylizedrepetition of acts’ (1988: 519) is useful in this regard. However, Butler’sconceptualisation of performativity also seems to privilege verbal discourse(speech, words and language) over practice in the constitution of identities(Butler 1997). Taylor’s (2003: 342) critique that ‘[i]n [Butler’s] trajectorythe performative becomes less a quality (or adjective) of ‘performance’than of discourse is thus valid, particularly when studying traditionally oral


communities such as the Naqab Bedouin. By looking at ‘the repertoire’of embodied and oral performances, rather than texts, narratives andspeech, Taylor aims to reclaim the performative for performance, movingaway from a focus on verbal written discourse characteristic of ‘Westernlogo-centricism’ (Taylor 2003: 342). Oral and lived traditions, whetherperformed in a more ritual way at weddings and other ceremonies orat home with friends and family, are performative; they, in contrast tothe recorded and scripted, not only represent something, but also present,constitute and enact identities.

If we accept this premise—that the body, the oral andperformance/practice (i.e. Taylor’s ‘repertoire’ rather than ‘the archive’)are foundational to modes of knowing and being—then this also points totheir potential for resistance. This is not a resistance that takes over, but onethat maintains and ‘becomes’. Unlike writing, embodied, performed andoral discursive formations cannot be multiplied and exported in exactlythe same way. But they can maintain, reproduce, regenerate and transmitalternative cultural spaces in a participatory, embodied and affective way,to the young as well as to older people. This crucial performative andconstitutive role that the body and the voice play in transmitting, reshapingand enacting local indigenous knowledges and identities is difficult to eraseand ‘overwrite’—its potential lies in its actuality: it is rather than representssomething. Scholarly efforts in solidarity with the Naqab Bedouin thusneed to move beyond the modes of knowledge production commonand comfortable to much of Western and colonial science—the text, thearchive, the museum. This does not mean that these channels should beabandoned, but they need to be ‘defrosted’, brought alive and orientedtowards the future. Furthermore, there is also, and complementarily, aneed to start from, listen to, support and prioritise the community’s ownindigenous epistemes and ways of being in the world, which, in theirown immediate and actualised way, function as an important challengeand resistance to settler-colonial erasure.

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Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies (2016)Edinburgh University PressDOI: 10.3366/hlps.2016.0138© Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studieswww.euppublishing.com/journal/hlps

Erratum

Dr Sophie Richter-Devroe: Oral Traditions of Naqab BedouinWomen: Challenging Settler-Colonial Representations throughEmbodied Performance http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/hlps.2016.0128

The Editor and publishers deeply regret proofreading inconsistencies inthis article which resulted in errors in some of the Arabic transliterationswhen it was first published in Volume 15, Issue 1 (May 2016) and extendtheir apologies to the author.

The correct versions are reproduced below.

On page 43:

Mandeeli, mandeeli, ya Abu Mohammad, mandeeliMandeeli [my headscarf], mandeeli, Abu Muhammad, mandeeli

Albasak wa arawih asaafir cal-khaleeli.I wear it and go travelling to Khalil [Hebron].

Shashaati, shashaati, ya Abu Mohammad, shashaatiShashaati [white scarf worn by older Bedouin women], shashaati, AbuMuhammad, shashaati

Albasak wa arawih asaafir cal-bashaati.I wear it and go travelling to the Pasha.

Jakeeti, jakeeti, ya Abu Mohammad, jakeetiMy jacket, my jacket, Abu Muhammad, my jacket

Albasak wa arawih asaafir cal-Kuwaiti.I wear it and go travelling to Kuwait.

On page 45:

Yahrim calayy labis mandeel al-ghazzaWearing the beautiful headscarf is forbidden to me

Ili qataloo shuhada ghaza.Because of the martyrs who were killed in Gaza.

Yahrim calayy qus ash-shaleeshCutting my hair is forbidden to me

May 25, 2016 Time: 02:26pm hlps.2016.0138.tex


Ili qataloo fi ‘ard al-areesh.Because of those who were killed in the lands of al-Arish.

Yahrim calayy tazhir al-khirqaColouring [a special kind of] scarf is forbidden to me

Ili qataloo fi barqa.Because of those who were killed in Barqa.

Yahrim calayy labis mandeelWearing the headscarf is forbidden to me

Ili qataloo fi-‘ard al-khaleel.Because of those who were killed in the lands of Hebron.

Yahrim calayy al-kohl fi-l- cainWearing kohl on my eyes is forbidden to me

Ili qataloo fi wadi hneen.Because of those who were killed in Wadi Hunayn.

On page 47:

At-Tiyaha wazra coo al-‘ard (or al-blaad)The Tiyaha were farming the land

Min ghaza l-al-areesha wa ghaad.From Gaza to al-Arish and further.

Al-yoom ahlim al-layali tan ceed zay kaanToday I am dreaming that the nights return as they used to be

Wa aruh ghaza wa waqf fi krum al-khaanAnd I go to Gaza and sit in the orchards of Khan (Yunis).

Ya maq cad al-beit wa-l-humum kthaarYou who stays inside and has many worries

Tala cti fi-l-khalla (or variation: srihti al-ghanam) btawal al- comaarIf you go out in the open (or variation: if you graze the sheep), thatlengthens life.

oral traditions of naqab bedouin women s songs, oral poetry and performances contain important...

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